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Low orbits. Through a study of many lunar orbiting satellites, scientists have discovered that most low lunar orbits (LLO) are unstable. [5] Four frozen lunar orbits have been identified at 27°, 50°, 76°, and 86° inclination. NASA described this in 2006: Lunar mascons make most low lunar orbits unstable ... As a satellite passes 50 or 60 ...
In the Solar System, all planets, comets, and asteroids are in such orbits, as are many artificial satellites and pieces of space debris. Moons by contrast are not in a heliocentric orbit but rather orbit their parent object. Geocentric orbit: An orbit around the planet Earth, such as that of the Moon or of artificial satellites.
Most lunar low orbits below 100 km (60 mi) are unstable. [2]Lunar Module Eagle in lunar orbit during Apollo 11, July 1969. Gravitational anomalies slightly distorting the orbits of some Lunar Orbiters led to the discovery of mass concentrations (dubbed mascons) beneath the lunar surface caused by large impacting bodies at some remote time in the past.
In 1966, Peter Goldreich published a classic paper on the evolution of the Moon's orbit and on the orbits of other moons in the Solar System. [8] He showed that, for each planet, there is a distance such that moons closer to the planet than that distance maintain an almost constant orbital inclination with respect to the planet's equator (with ...
The two outermost planets complete an orbit in 41 and 54.7 days, resulting in four orbits for every three. The innermost planet, meanwhile, completes six orbits in exactly the time the outermost ...
The orbits of Solar System planets are nearly circular. Compared to many other systems, they have smaller orbital eccentricity. [70] Although there are attempts to explain it partly with a bias in the radial-velocity detection method and partly with long interactions of a quite high number of planets, the exact causes remain undetermined. [70] [74]
The Family Portrait of the Solar System taken by Voyager 1. The Family Portrait, or sometimes Portrait of the Planets, is an image of the Solar System acquired by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, from a distance of approximately 6 billion km (40 AU; 3.7 billion mi) from Earth. It features individual frames of six planets and a partial background ...
In the Solar System, many of the disturbances of one planet by another are periodic, consisting of small impulses each time a planet passes another in its orbit. This causes the bodies to follow motions that are periodic or quasi-periodic – such as the Moon in its strongly perturbed orbit, which is the subject of lunar theory.